Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Varieties of Erotic Experience
    The Varieties of Erotic Experience
    The Varieties of Erotic Experience
    Ebook40 pages35 minutes

    The Varieties of Erotic Experience

    By Paul Reidinger

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In an American city of old churches and ambitious pagans, death comes calling for an elderly woman—a bit ahead of schedule. God takes a meeting or two, and the eternal questions arise. A funeral becomes a party, a son inherits a home with an uninvited guest, an iron lady is in the house, and they need more burgers down at the Weber grill. The Varieties of Erotic Experience blends the sacred, the profane, the urbane, and the humane into a tangy literary cocktail.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGemmaMedia
    Release dateFeb 2, 2013
    ISBN9781936846283
    The Varieties of Erotic Experience
    Author

    Paul Reidinger

    Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

    Read more from Paul Reidinger

    Related to The Varieties of Erotic Experience

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    • Article

      Freedom

      Aug 6, 2020

      Freedom
      7 min read

    • Article

      Push

      Aug 4, 2022

      Push
      5 min read

    • Article

      Immaculate

      Nov 1, 2020

      Immaculate
      9 min read

    • Article

      Bearing Witness

      May 30, 2021

      Lauren Hough is unicorn-level rare: someone who strode on to Twitter cracking witty and street-wise, a sharp-tongued yet strikingly kind presence. She wrote a cracking essay that went, well, pandemic-level viral, was snapped up for a book deal, and h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Jun 1, 2020

      Table Talk
      11 min read

    • Article

      Peter Mountford

      Dec 15, 2017

      Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted. He paddled her hard at some point, and that hot stin

      28 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Than Fiction

      Jul 20, 2021

      Stranger Than Fiction
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      Absolute Best

      Apr 30, 2021

      Absolute Best
      20 min read

    • Article

      Happy Endings

      Sep 1, 2023

      Happy Endings
      5 min read

    • Article

      La Bohème

      Mar 1, 2022

      ON A SATURDAY or Sunday afternoon in the cold early months of 1988, I sat alone at a table for two in a Greenwich Village diner, twenty-four years old, hopelessly young, my notebook open in front of me. At the table next to mine were three people, al

      13 min read

    • Article

      My Best Friend

      Oct 1, 2020

      My Best Friend
      6 min read

    • Article

      Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop

      May 10, 2021

      Rachel’s last semester at the University of Michigan would have been easy if not for the news that reached her six weeks before her final exams. It wasn’t a phone call—the phone lines were still down from the most recent blizzard to hit Paradise, she

      28 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sophia Shalmiyev

      Dec 20, 2019

      Let us begin at the natural home of all the white-men-are-garbage controversies and go right to the crotch area. The post A Year in Reading: Sophia Shalmiyev appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Riccardo

      Jun 14, 2022

      My understanding of my family’s religion was that we didn’t have to go to church if we didn’t want to and that our belief in God was tenuous at best. I grasped the seventh principle, “the interconnected web of all existence,” and I understood the hum

      14 min read

    • Article

      We All Have Our Stories

      Mar 1, 2021

      We All Have Our Stories
      14 min read

    • Article

      ‘We Are Bridges’: Featured Nonfiction from Cassandra Lane

      Apr 20, 2021

      Lane's memoir, which won the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, explores the author's ancestral history in order to give her future child a family history. The post ‘We Are Bridges’: Featured Nonfiction from Cassandra Lane appeared first on The

      8 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Noah Warren

      Dec 1, 2020

      Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streetsand in the ga

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Varieties of Erotic Experience

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Varieties of Erotic Experience - Paul Reidinger

      I.

      June felt bad about dying on Sam’s mother. This seemed to be the very height of being a bad hostess—invite the mother of your son’s friend to stay in your home, then drop dead—and it certainly wasn’t part of the understanding that had brought the other woman west so that the two of them could meet at last. The meeting was supposed to be about their sons, Philip and Sam, whose togetherness somehow remained incomplete while the mothers remained unacquainted.

      And they finally did meet. They met because June, under sentence of death from the doctors, knew it was now or never and because Caricia turned out to feel much the same way. The bridge had never been burned, just never built.

      They got on with each other. They ate breakfast together every morning and shared the newspaper over coffee as January became February and springtime peeked through the overcast. They walked, they napped—or, June napped while Caricia quietly tidied up, saw to the laundry, emptied the dishwasher, and drew up a grocery list. They spoke of their sons and husbands. Each admitted to being relieved about having a son who preferred other sons, and each was somewhat surprised to hear the other say so.

      They went to church. This was mainly Caricia’s idea. She led the way and held June’s hand. June’s other hand clutched a cane. They didn’t go to a specific church but to a variety of them. In June’s long previous life as a healthy person, she had been only vaguely aware of churches as buildings she was speeding past on her way to or from important earthly business. Now, in a slower and slowing life, she saw how many there were just a few blocks from her house.

      The pagan city revealed itself as a city of churches, and there were people inside those churches, more than a few. But few of those people were people like her: upper-middle class, educated, and pale. Her kind had long ago abandoned the churches and everything they stood for as medieval and superstitious and somehow embarrassing. Faith was beneath enlightened people, even as cultural theater or a pleasant way to pass the time.

      It was not with the greatest of ease that June stepped into these houses of God, even though Caricia stood beside her like a bodyguard and translator and the congregants were kind and were glad to see her. They had never seen her before, but they embraced her in all her strangeness. She smiled back, but she was thinking, Why is your God so angry with me, why is He killing me, why has He planted His terrible flower garden inside my skull?

      And here she was, in a house of that very God in Whom she did not believe, hoping for a miracle of redemption and salvation she did not believe was possible. It was all a waste of time, but what

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1